Backup Costs with/without Compression

Here is a short calculation of Informix Backup costs with and without compression.Informix backup can be compressed in different ways:- ontape to disk (with ONCONFIG Parameters BACKUP_FILTER and RESTORE_FILTER)- onbar to tape (with ONCONFIG Parameters BACKUP_FILTER and RESTORE_FILTER)- onbar to tape (with TSM compression)

The compression size depends on the compression tool/algorithm and the data(CHARs versus VARCHARS, BYTE, TEXT, BLOBs and so on).Compression time (Backup Time) depends only on the compression tool/algorithm,the number of CPUs the tool can use and the CPU frequency.

For the example calculation we assume, that the resulting (compressed) backup sizeis between 25% and 45% and the monthly storage costs for the backup is about0.15 USD per GByte per month (or 1.80 USD per GByte per year).We also assume, that we need one full backup per instance per day (to shorten therecovery time) and about 10 GByte logfiles to backup.

You can test your backup time and compression size with following commands:

Comentários (2)

Maybe when testing time and compression ratio, ontape should be
invoked with fake option i.e.
ontape -s -L 0 -F .....
Because without fake option, reserved pages will be updated which
could lead to useless backups.
Regards,
Hrvoje